One thing should be crystal clear about the murky incident involving Lumberton High School students who put on burqas in class: The hijackers on 9/11 were terrorists, not freedom fighters. No civilized person should ever try to minimize the horror of that atrocity or sympathize with the killers.

Beyond that, however, the incident is harder to decipher. It appears to be a lesson about foreign cultures that may have been misinterpreted ... or was badly conceived from the start.

Superintendent John Valestro said the incident was taken out of context, intended only to educate students about religion and customs in other countries. If so, that's fine. Education is supposed to be a broadening experience, and learning about another culture does not diminish ours.

In fact, the more that American students learn about the burqa, the more they should oppose it. It's a tent-like garment used to oppress women in the name of keeping them modest. If a Muslim woman chooses to wear it, that's one thing. But the reality is that many Muslim women would be severely punished if they did not.

The classroom incident galvanized so many people because the 9/11 hijackers were Islamic extremists and our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan fought that same enemy for years. Yet most Muslims oppose terrorism as much as we do, and ordinary Muslims have suffered far more casualties from terrorism than Westerners.

That's a lot for anyone to sort out, much less a high school student still learning and growing. Lumberton ISD officials should clarify exactly what happened.